Archive for July, 2011

Google has announced trial of its Page Speed service. It will be an online service that automatically speeds up loading of web pages. In order to use this service, webmasters have to sign up and point their site’s DNS entry to Google. According to Google’s blog post

Page Speed Service fetches content from your servers, rewrites your pages by applying web performance best practices, and serves them to end users via Google’s servers across the globe. Your users will continue to access your site just as they did before, only with faster load times. Now you don’t have to worry about concatenating CSS, compressing images, caching, gzipping resources or other web performance best practices.

As of now, Page Speed Service is being offered to a limited set of webmasters free of charge.

Google promises that pricing will be competitive and details will be made available later.

We tried it with one of our test blogs and noticed negligible improvements. Google claims to have observed speed improvements of 25%-60% on several sites.

Industry analysts have estimated that online ad spending will reach an astounding figure of $50 billion by 2015. This will be almost the double of online ad spending in 2010 which $26 billion.

This is largely due to increase in banner ad marketing. These figures highlight the fact that internet marketing is growing at a frantic rate as well as increased usage of internet all over the world.

For any business making its presence felt on internet has now become a very crucial step. It has reached such proportions in some advanced economies that companies without any web presence are in danger of becoming irrelevant soon.

Online shopping is surging, more people are on internet thanks to Smartphones & tablets, Facebook and social media sites have made people addicted to internet. With such huge usage of internet, companies have figured out that reaching their customers where they spend most of their time make more sense. And hence, huge increase in online ad spending is being predicted.

Apart from online ad spending another type of marketing is also being adopted by most companies. Search engine marketing or SEO aims at promoting a site on search engine such as Google & Bing. Almost everyone must have used search engines to find some services or products. Most likely, you must have clicked at top listings of the search results. SEO company use various tactics to rank websites higher up in search listings.

In the last few years, Social Media Marketing (SMO) has also emerged very strongly due to increased popularity of sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn. While exact figures for SEO and Social Media marketing are hard to get, it can be safely assumed that they match Online Ad spending and will only go north in next few years.

It is very vital that any organization keeps a part of their marketing budget for online whether it’s banner, PPC, SEO or SMO. Because if you don’t now then you may soon perish!

As widely mentioned in media and confirmed by Google, a minor Google Panda update has been made.

The recent update is one of the about 500 changes Google is making to their ranking algorithms every year.

Google told Search Engine Land, “this update incorporates some new signals that help differentiate between higher- and lower-quality sites.” “As a result, some sites are ranking higher after this most recent update,” Google added.

We also noticed improvements in many keywords in three of our own sites. Were you affected? Share with us your results and observations

Vanessa Fox, a former Google employee and now a well respected SEO, was recently interviewed by Eric Enge. Check out the interview on Eric’s blog

The interview covered a host of issues and believe me, it is a must read for any SEO who wants to know a little bit more on how Google works. After all, Fox worked for Google. I will suggest reading this interview at least a couple of time to absorb and assimilate. The article is not just for SEO consultants but for any website owner.

Here are few interesting bits of this interview

“there is a wall between the organic search people and everything else at Google”

Fox states that there is wall between the organic team and the Adwords team. This segregation ensures that the organic search team is concerned solely on providing the best search results to users. They are not bothered about the revenue side of Google.

According to Fox, Google’s engineers are very loyal and love their jobs. She even claims that they have very high professional integrity. NERDS!!!

I will say that Fox, is just being too liberal with her compliments.

“Panda is platform for new ways to understand the web and understand user experience”

Panda has been in news for months now and has been hated with full fervor by most SEO experts and site owners. Fox, delved in detail with Panda and provided many deep insights in to it.

Fox stressed that Panda is important and is here to stay. Panda is a platform for new ways to understand the web and UX.

According to her, there are no short term or quick fix results for those affected by Panda updates.

A better solution will be to have an unbiased and dispassionate observer check out the site and provide feedback. Try to find which aspects of a site needs improvement. There are so many signals now apart from just links: Site speed, content quality, User experience, Content uniqueness.

Vanessa said that adding value to a site will play an important role. After all, there are so many sites saying virtually the same things with just different words. Content Sameness needs to be tackled with user generated content like forums and reviews.

Bottom line: Sites will need to be lot more interactive and useful then they ever were if they hope to succeed.

“I think it becomes harder to reverse engineer Search engines for a number of reasons.”

Search engines like Google and Bing continue to be more obscure. It is becoming difficult to try game them. No, it has got nothing to do with specific intentions but the nature of web right now. With so many signal around it will be almost impossible to measure impact of any one search signal.

Unlike the old simple days, when there were no twitter, Facebook and Google + buttons, now there are so many signals that try to game will soon become an exercise in futility.

NOTW is quite famous and has a long history. It is one of the most celebrated tabloids in Britain but this one mistake from their over-eager reporters has tarnished their credibility for ever.

While, NOTW and its owners deserve every bit of condemnation and punishment, what we can’t loose sight of is public’s own insatiable appetite for sleazy news and sensationalism.

News and media outlets are filled to gills with inane news and tidbits of celebrities of every shape, size and character. Murderers, sex maniacs, philandering spouses, corrupt tycoons, are our new heroes.

Daily new celebrities are destroyed and newer ones created. There is a mad race to get the most weird and inconsequential news. Public is getting hungrier and media is feeding everything it can lay its hands on.

NOTW also succumbed to this pressure and went further. It treaded in to a zone which was not only legally untenable but also morally reprehensible.

Similarly, SEO industry is also many times accused of indulging in tactics which are deemed unacceptable in an Internet where rules are made by one entity called Google. SEO companies are always under pressure to deliver extraordinary results (which many times they themselves promise) with even more extraordinary deadlines. As a result, what we see is link selling and buying and other sleazy tactics on a huge scale to influence Google search results.

All this and much worse activities, often called black hat tactics, are carried out rampantly many times without the client’s knowledge. Clients just like NOTW’s readers smug and happy never bother to ever think on what methodologies were used.

Have you also hired a SEO company for your SEO campaign? Have you ever tried to know how they are going to achieve top rankings for you? If not, ask today because in case your SEO company is violating Google’s webmaster guidelines then it won’t be the SEO company that is going to be punished but your own WEBSITE!

Delhi Belly is full of expletives, potty jokes and a whacky plot with few fine performances.

There is no ‘Delhi’ in Delhi Belly except for a fried chicken from a roadside vendor which inflicts one of the lead characters with the world famous Delhi Belly.

The producer Aamir Khan said, the film is an Adult comedy. If profanities make a film adult then I guess it is one.

But apart from abusive language, there is nothing much adult about it. And, certainly not much Delhi. The storyline though bit novel (by Bollywood’s standard) is not something that we have not seen in last few years.

So what is the reason behind the success of Delhi Belly? What can we learn and apply from to marketing especially internet marketing.

1) Pedigree: Delhi Belly’s is backed by Aamir Khan, who is probably the biggest star in Bollywood right now. Anything form his production house automatically garners eye balls and whips frenzied media hype.

From internet marketing’s perspective, what you can learn is that, if you have a name in your industry, cash on it. If you have been successful with your earlier products and ventures then while launching a product, remind your audience/niche about your previous success.

If you are newbie then you can contact internet marketing gurus and get them to back or endorse your product.

2) Publicity Blitz: Delhi Belly was releasing on the same date as ‘Buddha Hoga Tera Baap’. Aamir Khan is a master at managing media. In his last few films he has courted media like never before. For this film also, he ensured that the film got as much attention from media as possible. He certainly succeeded.

If you are also launching your site or product, then your only chance is all out promotion. Whatever industry you are in, chances are that it is already overcrowded with thousands of similar websites. If you are thinking about succeeding on the strength of your product or services then you can be in for a long haul. While promoting your website, explore & exploit every avenue. Blogs, article directories, web directories, press releases, book marking. Offer guest posts on other blogs related to your industry. Be proactive and regular about it. Article directories are a great way to get traffic and also search rankings. You can hire a SEO company to do your promotion or do it yourself if you have time and expertise. These tactics are low cost and highly effective. Get the word out about your website/product.

3) Controversial: ‘Delhi Belly’ courted many controversies. From the lyrics of a song to jokes on a popular car brand to expletives – everything in this film was intended to raise eyebrows. And it served producer’s purpose also.

Similarly, if you want to get instant publicity for a not-so- stellar website/product/services then be controversial. Take potshots at rivals, call names to industry leaders, align yourself with a camp and be open about it. Anything to stir the pot and get attention. Be careful with this approach because it can backfire magnificently.

4) Exclusivity: ‘Delhi Belly’ asked for an adult rating certificate from the Indian censor board and got it. The producers publicized the fact that this movie had adult content and hence was unsuitable for viewing with family. This tactic made people more curious about it. Since people under 18 were not allowed to watch this movie, this raised inquisitiveness even more. This contributed to more people coming to theatres just to see what the heck is there in this film.

When people are prohibited/forbidden from doing something, they are more tempted to do it. Make your launch only available to only certain people. Only invite certain people to test your product or even better openly proclaim that this product is only for certain kind of people. You can do it by releasing it to only certain niche or by your pricing strategy. Make people curious. Make them want to join your network. If you can do so then your chances of success improves tremendously.